Archive on ulno.net

New Video: 4 Studio, 3 Wireless Headphones, 1 Surprise - Testing quality and could we sleep in them?

Sat, 08 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0200

This was a pretty spontanous production inspired by a big clean-up operation by our special camera guy and editor Sylvio from Granmidia. He found lots of headphones used for studio production and thought we could give it a spin and maybe a funny twist here in the IoTempire. I threw in a couple of my own as well as a little surprise, and we were ready to shoot. Unfortunately, it got a little longer than expected, but we think there are still lots of funny moments to explore.

Techunboxing: From Sleepable Headphones to DIY Phone

Sat, 01 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0200

Finally, some time to take a look at all the tech that came in recently. Join me on this little (hopefully entertaining) journey to unpack everything and please share your ideas what you would like to see me build next with all of this.

Of Bookmarks, Tags, and Browsers

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0200

Buku bookmark manager and Oil bookmark search in action (editor: tilde).

I recently acknowledged the fact that I had 70 tabs open in Chrome on my Desktop and 110 tabs open on my mobile firefox browser. Even using tab-suspend plugins like described here did not hide the fact that I was starting to create quite a browser mess here. Being sometimes kind of old-school, I thought: great, let’s tidy all up and sort them into bookmarks. However, open tabs have some kind of to-do status for me and I didn’t want to lose this to-do idea. So I could not just file them away in folders, but I needed a tagging function to sort one and the same tag into several categories. Unfortunately using bookmarks is deemed kind of old-fashioned today: Why bother remembering if Google can not find it easily anyway? Therefore old folder structures exist, but the ideas of tags and categories only attracts very few people and therefore is also not well supported by the open source community.

Comfortable Command Line Editors for Single Board Computers for Teaching IoT -> meet tilde

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0200

My new favorite, the tilde command line editor.

This is a follow-up of my recent command line-editor review here on my blog. There, I was looking at nice edit (ne), micro, and kaaedit. As I was teaching recently a new Internet of Things (IoT) class - Home and Building Automation, I was looking for simple to use command editors for my new IoT framework ulnoiot. emacs and vi were not “comfortable” enough to expose my students to. Having to use git, ssh, and the command line was enough of a challenge to pose, so I wanted to go easy with the editor. I wanted something that behaved very normally and transparently even in the remotely accessed command line. It needed to even support the mouse.

Try ulnoiot for your own IoT class - first test successful

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0200

I just finished teaching another iteration of Home and Building Automation at the FH Upper Austria. It is one of my favorite classes - and gaging from student feedback the appreciation goes two ways.

Do NOT Use Slack for any Commercial, Non-Profit, Academic or Educational Projects

Sun, 11 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0200

I can already see the comments: Why are you so cheap? You Open Source addict! Use Google!

But it’s too late. I ran into their trap as I wanted to be modern with my students.

Software Architecture (With an Agile Twist) at GMU Finished With Huge Success

Sun, 11 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0200

It has been an intense but fun 16 weeks teaching my first Software Architecture class at George Mason University (GMU).

I want to thank my colleague Jeff Offutt for the encouragement to update the course content and give it an agile twist. And of course, I want to thank my students for encouraging feedback and energy to making this a success.

Build Your Own Data Collection IoT Devices at GU, DC USA

Wed, 03 May 2017 00:00:00 +0200

I am talking today at the Analytics Seminar at Georgetown Univesity, Washington, DC. Check out my slides here.

Abstract:

DIY technological devices, making, and hacking are becoming more and more accessible for anybody. Especially for creating your own data and doing your own analytics this trend offers exiting opportunities. In my talk, I will focus on a $3 wireless microcontroller based on the ESP8266 (the same chip which is used in the Amazon Dash Button) and the Raspberry Pi Zero W, which is sometimes available for $10. Both support wireless connectivity. Therefor, they are considered Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Changing your case to solve battery drain and overheating on the Google Nexus 6P Phone

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0200

My daily driver phone at the moment is a Google Nexus 6P. It is the last of Google’s true Nexus phones, so it is especially nice if you want to do some Android development and have more recent ROMs and access to new Android features. It is also a really nice option if you want to have very affordable worldwide cell and data coverage with Google’s Project FI which requires you to have a new Nexus Phone or the its successor, the Google Pixel. The difference to the Pixel does not seem so big, however, the 6P has a major downside: it runs a Snapdragon 810 which (under load) overheats even more than other cell phone processors.

Reviving GULEEK i8 with broken Display with Headless Magic and Arch Linux

Wed, 19 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0200

In February 2016, one of my Maker friends in Jakarta, Indonesia pointed me to an offer of an all-in-one PC too hard to pass up. It was a GULEEK i8 with Intel Quadcore Atom processor (Baytrail), 2 GB Ram, 16Gb ssd, built-in battery, 2 USB 2.0 Ports, micro sd-card reader, Windows 8.1 pre-installed. The whole package sold for incredibly low $70 a piece.

Nice but Powerful Command Line Editors as Alternatives to Vi and Emacs

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0200

Lots of Linux beginners face at one point or the other the problem that they have to change a small configuration inside the command line. There is no Notepad, IntelliJ, Eclipse, and not even Gedit or Kate available here.

Taming Chrome - Control tabs memory and free space for your work

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0200

Ever seen what a beast Google Chrome has become? I started monitoring that it easily took 2-3GB of my main memory sometimes and was really bogging my system down. Running Android Studio or Pycharm need quite some memory too and things got actually killed by the system once in a while, making me yet again re-consider Firefox.

Smart Home Project Update Started

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0200

I have committed to investing more time into my home automation and smart home activities.

As a first step I have updated the corresponding pages here on the site. Check out:

Issues installing isso as replacement for disqus and how to solve them

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0200

Due to extreme trouble with disqus (compare previous posts), I switched my discussion and commenting system to isso.

My server runs at this point Ubuntu 16.04 and therefore you can either use the available isso package (just do apt install isso) or install a newer package from an external source as described here.

New Youtube-video on blog/twitter/ifttt automation

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0200

Here is my video on showing how to automatically post a new blog entry to Twitter with IFTTT.

9yKdqdNUOLI

Twitter IFTTT Video Test

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0200

This is just a little test to automatically tweet what I write on my blog.And now the spelling is fixed too. Stay tuned and watch out for the corresponding youtube video.

ulno.net now safe - completely via https

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0200

As you might have seen, I had a lot of trouble getting disqus back up running for post discussions here on ulno.net. During the related experiments, I also finally went to letsencrypt and folowed the procedure dsecribed there to generate a real certificate for ulno.net.

Disqus only working for old posts, switch to isso

Sun, 02 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0200

This is testing the disqus comments, this file was just copied and not generated from a working disqus post. There is something extremely strange happening as comments on my older posts work but not on new posts. It just tells me that it would not load and points me to their installation tutorial with very little documentation and debug options.

Article on my work on linkedin

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Here is a nice article on linkedin by Kathy Stershic on my work in IoT security and home autmation: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/maker-craft-alternative-more-secure-approach-internet-kathy-stershic

Maker Faire 2017 and eHome news

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0100

I have been busy bulding a new ehome demonstrator. It’s not from lego like the LegoEHomeDemonstrator it’s again from wood like eHomeDemosntrator v1. It’s a little smaller and has lots of wireless devices based on the Wemos D1 Mini running Micorpython.

Article on disrupted communities, Making and IoT

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Chris Bennett and I just [published an article on linkedin on disrupted communitiesm the Internet of Things, and Making. Check it out: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/disrupted-communities-unique-view-how-people-making-things-bennett

Midnight Commander in Ubuntu - not opening zip and jar files

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0200

Just a really weird dicovery:

I was recently getting problems opening zip (and jar) archives on Midnight Commander (on my Xubuntu 15.04 Desktop). I repacked soem jars and some opened but most didn’t. Today I was dicovering that also zip-archives were not browsable anymore. Then I stumblen upon this post: https://www.midnight-commander.org/ticket/2623 (created 4 years ago). It basically tells you to check /usr/lib/mc/extfs.d/uzip and change

Re-Installing Samsung Note 3 (N9005) for encryption and NFC unlock

Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0200

What an installation hell (2 days wasted)…

Being constantly exposed to all potential features of Mobile Phones, I wanted to have several things going on at the same time:

Full encryption of the phone with long password entered usually only at boot time
Using an NFC ring usually to unlock the phone (I was hoping to use Smart Lock for it.)
Being able to run Unity and Vuforia-based projects from my student (this actually lead to having to use maximum Kitkat)
Being able to use k9 (also serious display issues in Lollipop)
Root access

Summing it up, it was extremely hard. The only solution I could get working, was getting a stock ROM for the Samsung phone from some shady download site, using Odin 3.09 to flash the respective Rom, encrypting the phone (I think it maters to do this first), using chainfire to re-root it, and then installign Xposed and there NFC Screen unlock.

Gitolite and Nikola, auto deploy

Thu, 02 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0200

I am trying to test here, if the autodeploying with git and Nikola works. If it does, I will explain how it works. It seems like GIT_DIR and GIT_WORK_TREE play a big role like described here. Basically you should use a solution like this here.

Wordpress to Nikola

Wed, 01 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0200

Long time no blogging - and no, this is not an april-fool’s joke. I just spent some time moving over from wordpress to a static blog. I wasn’t able to upgrade to Wordpress 5 (it broke my site), so I was looking for updates. As I like python, Nikola (http://getnikola.com) fit my bill. Still, I want to go all static and have therefore disabled comments. If you like a post and want your opinion visible, please don’t hesitate to drop me a note at the email listed at contact mentioning the post you refer to and I will include your opinion here.

Meeting Report PACC

Wed, 16 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Report on 16/4/13

Yana

Building GUI

Met problem with overwriting personal files Research on parallelized processes, ssh keys

To Do

Assess if the moodle has heart bleed vulnerability(OpenSSL)

Kamilla/Asset

No progress on iScazy

Gpu passthrough to guest machine

Sun, 13 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Good day, readers! I want to share with you some ideas on GPU virtualisation.

This topic is pretty new for me, however, since I had experience with CUDA, and some times was called ‘The gpu master’ by our prof, i decided to take this as a challenge for myself

Introduction

Sun, 13 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Hello everyone! My name is Georgiy, origin is Almaty, Kazakhstan and I am assisting to professor Ulrich in creation and maintenance of Private Academic cloud, in Kazakhstan, Nazarbayev University. I had some experience with CUDA programming in past, not afraid of trying something new, have a pretty wierd (but lazy) mind, so maybe that’s why I am here.

So, these are my jan through feb activities

Sun, 13 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

During the period starting from 27 Jan and lasting till 24 Feb the following jobs were performed: Got

clear understanding and aims of existing task. Prepared pcs for execution of future tasks. Learned

Virtualisation, part II

Sun, 13 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

So, last two weeks were pretty difficult for me, maybe because of warm spring (at freaking last!), maybe because I had studied a lot.

Despite these facts i have some results on my virtualization research.

PACC Meeting April 9, 2014

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Ulrich: Good news. We might be able to hire interns for summer. Nursultan might be convinced to be POC if I am not available in the summer. We might want to find newer projects, an area where he can perform more work. My wish is that he likes his team and be able to direct it well. Aleks is now with us, and will be helping the administrative aspects, and might be interested in some of your work.

PACC project report 1

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

My and Asset’s task for the first few weeks of the PACC research was to assemble, configure and run the Synology Diskstation DS413j. (). Initially we had 5 of them, each having 4 hard drives 4GB each.

PACC report 1

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

.. post_format:Link .. tags:iSCSINAS

Hello, this is my first post during Spring 2014. To start with, my first task was related to NAS (Network Attached Storage), in collaboration with Kamila we assembled 5 Synology DS413j Diskstations. Synology DS413j is a 4 bay NAS server. Each NAS has total of 16TB memory. As always we couldn’t install the software using official manual, but with help of professor we finally found our NASs in the network ( more on this in Kamila’s post).

Report (Almas) early draft

Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Lab 7422

January - february 2014:

Used chmod -R 777 on user/local, created vulnerability that may have been exploited by viruses and malware. Corrected by UlNo (old local folder was deleted and copy was cloned from other PC).

Meeting 2nd of April

Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Kamila & Asset

NAS is being repaired

TODO

automatic mounting iSCSI

Yana

Finished GUI

Georgiy

Research further parsing of Nvidia network through PCI

Yerkanat

Installing OpenStack

Temirlan

Hadoop Map reducers scripts

Alexandra

PACC (report 1)

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Hi,

this is the first report on the work I done for the PACC Project.

I had joint the group in the beginning of February. First few weeks I was busy with the 4th floor lab setup. During the 1st week I had checked the functionality of hardware, installed Ubuntu on lab machines and reported any hardware related issues to the IT.

Part-time Job at PACC (post 1)

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Hello to everyone who might be reading my post now!

So, I started my part-time job at PACC project in the beginning of February.

We firstly started by setting up the computer lab on the 4th floor. We found out that there are several machines that do not work properly or were configured in a wrong way. So we needed to check each computer to make sure everything is working.

Hello Everybody!

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0100

Hello everybody!

My name is Alibek Sailanbayev,

Recently I became a member of your team, nice to meet you!

Now I’m working in project about “data retrieval”..

Regards, Alibek Sailanbayev

Report I

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0100

MapReduce in HDFS (Hadoop File System)

MapReduce - is a framework for distributed computing of tasks using a large number of computers (called “nodes”), forming a cluster. HDFS has its own MapReduce framework.

Program of the Seminar on Academic Cloud Computing

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Click on Seminar on Academic Cloud Computing Program to link to a copy of the program.

Seminar Summary

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0100

More than 40 researchers, practitioners, and students attended and participated in the Seminar on Academic Cloud Computing held in the School of Science and Technology at Nazarbayev University on November 20, 2013.

Final Agenda for the Seminar on Academic Cloud Computing

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0100

**Date: **20 November 2013 **Time: **9:00 AM – 16:30 PM **Location: **Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan **Venue: **School of Science & Technology, Block 7, 7210

The seminar gathered researchers, practitioners, and students in the area of cloud computing in an academic setting. The seminar showcased presentations on different research projects, a keynote speech by the Primary Investigator of the Private Academic Cloud Computing project and a keynote on Software Engineering the Cloud by an international invited guest speaker. The focus of the seminar was on the benefits of cloud computing in the areas of academic research, teaching, and administrative operations.

Discussion Table Topics (& Moderators)

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0100

The seminar culminated with small group discussions addressing the following topics:

GPU Computing and Computer Applications in Health Care (Magzhan Ikram)
Academic Cloud Computing Student Projects: Industry & University Internships and Opportunities (Laura Paluanova)
Localizing Cloud Services to Run Your Own Dropbox, Email, VOIP System, or Social Network (Ulrich Norbisrath)

Keynote Speaker Biographies

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Dr. Ulrich Norbisrath is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Nazarbayev University’s School of Science & Technology. His research is in the areas of Ubiquitous Computing and Information Management. He works on ad-hoc networks and spontaneous private clouds as well as a biometric technology broker framework. His Friend-to-Friend (F2F) Computing concept allows for the ad-hoc establishment of scientific- or service-based networks or private clouds. He has developed methods and tools to support migrating legacy desktop and server environments to the cloud and calculating their respective costs. Professor Norbisrath teaches courses on agile software development, graph transformation, systems, and mobile computing.

Map and Access Information to Nazarbayev University

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0100

All seminar attendees not affiliated with Nazarbayev University are advised to bring personal identification to present for access at the university entrance on the day of the event. The seminar will be held in the School of Science & Technology, in Block 7, room 7210. Please click on the the map below to enlarge the image.

Presentations for the Academic Cloud Computing Seminar

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Following are the presentations that have been confirmed for the Academic Cloud Computing seminar to be showcased at Nazarbayez University on November 20. Please also see the links to the Call for Participation and Call for Presentations that contain pertinent information on this seminar open to all interested attendees at no cost.

Seminar sponsorship package details

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Sponsorship Package for the Seminar on Academic Cloud Computing

Sponsor Level & Amount (in KZT)	Bronze (150,000-300,000)	Silver (300,000-750,000)	Gold (750,000+)
_Link to sponsor on the seminar website_
_Sponsor logo included on the seminar invitation_
_Included in seminar program circulated to all attendees_
_Company logo included on screen presentations_
_Banners, provided by sponsor, to be placed within venue_
_Table space for sponsor promotion throughout event_
_Sponsorship acknowledgement in host presentations_

Gold level sponsors will be credited with sponsoring the entire event.
Silver level sponsors will be credited with sponsoring an invited speaker.
Bronze level sponsors will be credited with sponsoring the seminar’s refreshment and lunch breaks.

'Call for Participation: Seminar on Academic Cloud Computing, 20.11.2013, Astana

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0200

.. Kazakhstan' .. tags: Private Academic Cloud Computing,Seminar on Academic Cloud Computing

Attention students, colleagues, researchers, and professionals:

You are invited to participate in the seminar on Academic Cloud Computing to be held in Astana, Kazakhstan, which will gather researchers and practitioners in the area of cloud computing in an academic setting.

'Call for Presentations: Seminar on Academic Cloud Computing, 20.11.2013, Astana

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0200

.. Kazakhstan' .. tags: Private Academic Cloud Computing,Seminar on Academic Cloud Computing

The faculty from the School of Science and Technology of Nazarbayev University invite proposals for individual presentations for a seminar on Academic Cloud Computing scheduled for 20 November 2013. The seminar will be hosted by Nazarbayev University.

Additional information for seminar participants: Transport, lodging & food

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0200

**PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION: **To get to Nazarbayev University take buses #10, 12, 27, 30, 40, 41, or 43. One-way bus ticket fare is 60 KZT, and mini bus ticket fare is 65 KZT (must be paid in cash to the fare collector on the bus).

PACC Week 7 Report

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

.. tags:Proxmox

This week I was working on **Proxmox Virtual Environment, **which is a Open Source Server Virtualization Platform, based on KVM and OpenVZ.

First of all, I tried to install Proxmox on VirtualBox. The OS installed fine but in order to control server you need to use web browser. So I needed connect to Proxmox server from Host machine. I tried several configurations NAT + Host-only and Bridged Network, but the connection was not established. It seems that Proxmox network settings are always creating bridge to any new interfaces. I didn’t really understand what was wrong, because the same configuration was forking fine on other OS.

Owncloud Week 6 Report

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

This week I worked on configuration of owncloud on Debian.

At first I tried to set it up on Nginx and Mysql, but following the tutorials, I faced various problems during the actual configuration. I tried installation of the LNMP first and then owncloud:

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
apt-get install nginx
/etc/init.d/nginx start
mkdir /var/www
chown www-data:www-data /var/www

apt-get install php5-cgi php5-mysql php5-curl php5-gd php5-idn php-pear php5-imagick php5-imap php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-ming php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl
nano /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini
(uncomment the line cgi.fix_pathinfo=1:)
apt-get install lighttpd
update-rc.d -f lighttpd remove
/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u www-data -g www-data -f /usr/bin/php5-cgi -P /var/run/fastcgi-php.pid
nano /etc/rc.local
(add before the exit line /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u www-data -g www-data -f /usr/bin/php5-cgi -P /var/run/fastcgi-php.pid)
nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
(change to worker_processes 5; keepalive_timeout 2;)
nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

See this tutorial for further configuration of the server: (http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-nginx-with-php5-and-mysql-support-on-debian-squeeze) Try out http://192.168.0.100/info.php Tutorial for owncloud installation (http://www.howtoforge.com/running-owncloud3-on-nginx-lemp-on-debian-squeeze-ubuntu-11.10) Then I tried to install owncloud over it, however, there was problem re-configuring the default webserver.

Owncloud Week 5 report

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

This week I tried to install and configure the Open Xchange, however following official tutorials, as well as other specialists’ guides, I was not able to configure it properly, since at the time, when the OX is trying to connect to the server and create user, it reports that there is an Authentication failure. Then I tried to install OX from Quick Installation Script, however I still wasn’t able to configure and run OX as it was intended. (http://oxpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Quickinstall_script)
I successfully installed Seafile 1.5.0 on Debian 6. Previously I tried to install the newest version, however there was some bug, since the installer didn’t recognize the presence of the python-simplejson, which was needed for further steps, complaining that there is still no one, however, it was installed already, re-installed and even updated. Then I tried the older version and it worked properly. Evaluation: I don’t consider Seafile as a good alternative to Owncloud, since even if it has such option as folder encryption, which protects user’s data from being viewed by the server admin, Seafile lacks functionality - no easy-to-upload interface, since you first need to create workspace and only then to upload files. It doesn’t have calendar, to-dos and other in-built apps.
I tried to setup Owncloud on Debian+nginxs+mysql, however pre-installation of LNMP and then reconfiguring owncloud to work with it, gave no result.

PACC Week 6 Report

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

This week I was working on connection between Guests that are located at different Hosts. The solution that worked was Bridged networking (“shared physical device”).

Host configuration

Stop network manager

sudo stop network-manager

'PACC: Week 8'

Wed, 17 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

When I was setting PAM authentication via LDAP I noticed one undesirable thing. When I log into the machine as an LDAP user it sometimes mixes up LDAP and local users. For instance, the user akim can access the home directory of csc-151-1 (even though they have different home folders). You can see the example below.

'PACC: Week VIII'

Wed, 17 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

On this week, I was dealing with problem of VM connection with host servers in libvirt. I have set aside the variant of using VDE, and continued to work on other possible solutions.

Developing Android Application 7

Wed, 17 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Weekly Review:

Finally I finished with accelerometer. This time I changed my method of dealing with that question. Instead of counting distance moved, I preferred to count step or changes in accelerometer, So, I used accelerometer data to find general linear acceleration and if it was greater 0.48(probably value required to make a step). Then I added located the orientation by orientation sensor and moved towards right angle. This time, I considered that I would move in labyrinth(only one direction move) and collected data of changing angle in degrees by orientation sensor and combined it accelerometer values. Later I drew background by matrices of true(wall) and false(empty space) and by using maze located my target on initial position, If I can move to the preferred direction, sensor data’s will change my position in map matrices and redraw it. I located initial position(where we can move) of each map by saving index by preferences table. Also, I added background music. I uploaded my initial movement project (Direct) in DropBox

Android 1.4

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Last week I tried to work with tiled map editor. I found that we need GDX library to work with it. I looked through with some tutorials and tried to run some of their examples. However, in android developer they did not run. The strange thing is there is no error in android project inside, but overall the project marked with warning mark. I checked all prerequests and pathes. It did not help. I workes with java 6 as I found in the internet suggested to use java 6. But, it did not work as well. Also, there is an open sourse AndEngine, which use tiles map. I downloaded it, but found its code too difficult to understand. Ultimately, I found a tutorial where the map could be made with help of simple matrix. I changed the UI a lot. Now, the project look like this

Owncloud Week 4 Report

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

In order to test alternatives to owncloud, VirtualBox with Debian was installed. I plan to test there Owncloud running on Nginx+Mysql combination, since the main server in our lab is running on Debian. I am also planning to install Seafile and OX, in order to research which of the following cloud services is a better solution to our project. Now I am facing the problem of the OX server authentification, need to resolve this, and continue the configuration. Information on Ajaxplorer: http://ajaxplorer.info/ Here is the link to the OX installation tutorial http://oxpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Open-Xchange_Installation_Guide_for_Debian_6.0_622

PACC Week 5 Report

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

.. tags:webvirtmgr

I joined my colleague Temirlan, now we are trying to setup connection between VMs that are hosted on different machines. I started by setting up my webvirtmgr servers. Now I have 2 servers each running 2 VMs. To do this I used links that I found at Temirlan’s post and also his help.

'PACC: Week 7'

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

The last week I was trying to establish a secure connection between LDAP server and clients. I first tried STARTTLS but could not configure it properly. The connection didn’t look to be secure between the clients and the server but between LDAP server and OwnCloud server only.

Android 1.3

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Map

I have decided to use Tiled map Editor. There are several advantages of it.

1) Your map will be divided into small tiles. So, you can control to add new wall and obstacles to the map.
2) It is easy to edit
3) You can create your .png file and make it tiled map.

Tiled map Editor can be downloaded from there official [site](http://www.mapeditor.org/)

[![AfPfV](/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/AfPfV-300x190.png)](/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/AfPfV.png)

To do

- To draw 3 maps
- To write a code which connected menu functions and maps
- To make an icon class code

Developing Android Application 6

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Weekly Review:

Changed formula for acceleration. Now I have instead three different acceleration one linear acceleration.

lin_accel = Math.sqrt(accel_x^2+accel_y^2+accel_z^2) - earth gravity

Now by this data I can move only forward or backward. I want to use data from gyroscope and detect angle of rotation. Despite I added low pass filter, accelerometer data is quite unpredictable and my object instead of moving to one side, jumps from side to side. So, I stopped here trying to find solution. I need complex mathematical formula. Found similar project in research centre in Spain(here is their website http://roodin.crs4.it/). Look to this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTZFRDBdQck&feature=related. I asked them to guide me. Hopefully after finishing this part I will work on combination maps and my code.

PACC: Week VII

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

After finishing my work on the acceleration of the VMs on my host server, with SPICE implementation I continued to work on the problem withconnection of VMs of different hosts

Transparent Proxy Week 4 Report

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

This week’s task was to install and run squid transparently. Unfortunately I figured out that DNS server is not working, I don’t know why, but at least I know that it was working when I installed it. I guess when I was experimenting with Squid I have messed something up.

Weekly meeting 26.07.2013

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Professor Michael Lewis:

Told good news from Samsung meeting(internship in Samsung office in Moscow, Samsung Lab and Samsung devices)

Asset:

Succeeded in setting up transparent proxy by proxy server SQUID, wants to join to Assulan

TODO: Talk with Shyrailam and collaborate with her

### **Alexandra:**

- LDAP secure connection doesn't work using STARTTLs but works over SSL/TLS. Change some setting in Aldab and connected to OwnCloud

TODO: look at NFS and try to configure it

### **Yerkanat:**

- Working on OpenStack

TODO: will finish OpenStack soon

### **Alexandr:**

- Almost finished M23

TODO: Help Yerkanat to finish OpenStack

### **Raushan:**

Found Tiled map editor and learned it.

TODO: Create final user interface, combine user interface and map, create a source code for maps

### **Damir:**

Changed moving formula, tried to combine result of gyroscope and accelerometer data. Found similar existing project in Spain

TODO: Look through internet for accurate formula, wait answer from research center in Spain

### **Temirlan:**

Worked on the virtualization stuff, solving problem with the connection of the virtual machines of different hosts by using VDE2. Has faced problems with switches, will be using dpipe.

### **Shyrailym:**

was working on KVM and VDE

TODO: to connect virtual network on different hosts

Owncloud Week 3 Report

Tue, 02 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Owncloud:

Rsnapshot now works properly, it performs backups on a regular scheduled basis as cron jobs.
Secure connection can now be established, since the SSL certificate was created.
Problem with the upload limit was resolved, both the php.ini and admin tab’s settings should be set up to the same value.
Remote connection from outside via Cygwin and SSH was established. All functionality of the owncloud was tested, synchronization and other stuff works properly.

Research:

Weekly meeting July,2 2013

Tue, 02 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Professor Norbisrath:

Trying to get extra hard drives

Shyrailym:

Contacted the Baadal development group in India, wants to set up a system here. System however is not finished yet, but some of its features could be very useful, for instance KVM.
Partially help Android department

Raushan:

Android-ers 1.2

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

As we decided to share our duties I took UI part. At first glance, it looks easy to create several pages and connect them. However, today I stucked with creating dialog window with 2 chech boxes and seek bars to regulate music and sound of a game. Hope, to finish all UI stuff by the next week. I want to make 2 different design of them. Let’s see what I will obtain. Then, I need to begin to work on maps. What I actually have so far. Soon, it will be much better

Developing Android Application 5

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Weekly Review:

I finally moved my image on phone screen but it is better reacts when I rotate my phone instead of moving it. I used data from accelerometer(gives us acceleration in x,y and z axis) and by formula Distance = (linear_acceleration)*(time^2)/2 found distance and added to current position. From internet tutorials, I concluded that combination of gyroscope and accelerometer make data more accurate. Also by using Kalman filter we can clear noise of data from accelerometer(it is very complex, not easy to use). Only now, I understand that difficulty between our project and previous one is same. One of solution for drawing on air and detecting it on screen, is to save coordinates by orientation sensor in 2 matrix array and later compare with array in database.

PACC: Week 6

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Worked on LDAP and Owncloud. At first, they worked fine together but user login names were displayed as sequences of random characters (for example, 0f47af12-70ef-1032-92b6-890f766dd4b3). This was fixed by simply specifying internal username attribute in advanced settings tab.

PACC: Week V

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

I have been absent for the last week, so here I will report about the things that I achieved before my leave . So mostly, I have been working on the acceleration of the VM

Diagram from meeting

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Transparent Proxy Week 2 Report

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

This week’s task was to create virtual network which will be similar to our lab’s network in order to test and evaluate Squid caching proxy server. Lab’s server has 2 network adapters: one is connected to university’s network, which has proxy, and another is hosting local network inside the lab, which uses transparent proxy implemented via redsocks. So all machines in our lab “think” that they don’t have a proxy.

Transparent Proxy Week 3 Report

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

This week I was creating virtual network. First of all, I need to make server VM to use proxy from university’s network. For this I used tunnelling, basically what I did was following: from server VM I ssh to lab’s server and tunnel ports so server VM could get internet with proxy from university’s network. Command looks like this:

Weekly meeting 26.06.2013

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Kamila: managed to setup up owncloud backup. It backs up only what has been changed. Authentication and security(SSL) issues. Future work: Setting up remote access to owncloud. Setting up owncloud on the server with backup and LDAP.

PACC: Week 5

Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

The past week I continued working on LDAP and PAM.

I thought that it would probably be useful if I had all users and groups stored in my LDAP. So, I imported existing groups and users. That resulted in 88 groups and 56 users, including not only real users, but mostly such items as avahi, bluetooth, video, audio and etc.

Android-ers

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Weekly review

Good news we finally decided with the project! There are 2 of its initial scenarios:

Scenario#1 Title: Complete the map (map#1)

Aim:

To show the best result by completing the map with greatest time and/or with the most amount of treasure.

Developing Android Application 4

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Weekly Review:

I suggested to concentrate on developing a puzzle game as our main project. I came to such conclusion due to several reasons:

Being able work with databases(basic knowledge enough)
Easy to peak up an idea(We can find the type of puzzle game for instance from old books)
Working with graphical interface

OpenStack Week 3

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

This week I deployed OpenStack.

In order to do that get devstack project from the github. We need its stable grizzly branch version:

https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack/tree/stable/grizzly

By default Network management is not installed, so add this text into “localrc” file:

Owncloud Week 2 Report

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Mobile application:

Owncloud official app requires installation of aCal, CardDav and other programms to provide functionality to the app, such as calendar, contacts and tasks synchronization. However, this is not direct sync with default mobile calendar, but rather with aCal’s calendar, which is a bit useless.
Other 3rd party clients are under development and also require additional app installation.
Solution: It would be better to connect to owncloud via browser, or process it so as to produce the mobile version (as Damir said, it is one of the three methods of creating mobile apps).

Backup: I have started searching for possible backup options:

Meeting report on 19.06.13

Fri, 21 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Prof.Norbisrath: started project with mathematicians

Looked for prices of clouds: very cheap Amazon give computing resources for first year for free,

The 1 hour of computing only 2 cents the cheapest one.

PACC: Week IV [VM network connection]

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

For this week, I continued to work with M23 program. Particularly on problem how to get to VM IP adress from physical network and VM be able to see all the machines in it. There are some different ways to do that:

'Android Developers '

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Report:

During week 1 the majority of work was dedicated to cover as much material as I could. There were

creating pop-up messages
creating menu function

context menu

writing LayoutParameters in MainActivity.java file
simple animation with text

Our project:

'PACC: Week 4'

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

At the beginning of the week, I introduced Epoptes and Italc to my new peers and we all agreed that Epoptes would be the best choice.

I tested wake-on-lan by powerwake, when computers are completely powered off, hibernated or suspended. It worked fine besides suspend. I think the problem is not in WOL since, after suspend, computer doesn’t normally wake up on its own.

'PACC: Week IV'

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Overview:

For this week, I have continued my work with libvirt manager. After getting the server running on one of the lab computers. I created several VMs for working on demo, which have been established on our meeting about virtualization.

Developing Android Application 3

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Weekly Review:

Last week I studied tutorials from http:/www.startandroid.ru/ru, which introduced me to basic theory(Activity, Intent and e.t.c) in simple language. By doing practice exercises and learning theory, I successfully reached to databases. Android can store data by:

Owncloud server and client installation

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Week 1 report:

-created server for owncloud and several users -installed clients on Ubuntu, Windows and Android -test and evaluate it

Create server:

For xUbuntu 12.10 run the following as root:

Transparent Proxy Week 1 Report

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

The problem was that at some point server was not responding and internet was down, so you needed to restart redsocks manually. As it seems when number of open connections exceeds 2000 server cannot open any more web pages, so internet was unavailable. This problem was solved by firstly raising the file limit and then starting redsocks. Here is the code:

Awesome bike!

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Thanks to the warm weather I am starting to love my bicycle again. However, how awesome are these (discoverd on gizmodo):

Maybe even my parents in law would approve of this one:

'PACC: meeting 4 notes'

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Good news! Air-conditioning will be installed!

Prof.Norbisrath: Brainstorming scenarios about the PACC project From next week new research assistant, help in organization of Mobile Computing Class. Android Netbeams is too problematic for development in Android(won’t be used)

First Post

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Hello everyone! This is my first week of internship and my work is developing android applications. As you know, Damir has already some progress in it, so he explained me much stuff about it. According to his previews blogs I found several useful tutorials, however Damir noticed that some of them could be complicated for beginners. In the first day he also taught me about everything he has been knowing so far. For example, the difference between various layouts, how to write strings, how to read an initial code. Eventually, I have learnt a lot of material from Damir. Thanks to him!=) Then, I continue to learn by myself. From the site startandroid.ru you can find 128 lessons for android developers. Now I am reading it and trying the programs in android developer tools eclipse. My first program was a counter. When you click the button it starts to count from 30 to 0. It is pretty simple one, but it seemed to me hard few day ago. Now, I will try to launch my own application. Now, I have some ideas what kind of program to create. But, I am not sure yet. If you have some ideas about it please share. Hope to finish MyFirstApp till the end of this week.

Starting PACC Internship

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Hello everyone,

My name is Yerkanat and will work with you at NU PACC project.

I plan to work about 9 hours a day, mostly in the lab.

My research topics:

Developing Android Application 2

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Weekly Review:

Previous Problem:

First is running emulator of any type phone with pure Android OS. Advantage of this method that we can control all properties phone. On the other hand, it is very slow. Even turning on the virtual phone takes minimum 30 minutes. Also there always occur small errors.

PACC: Week 2-3

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

During the past two weeks I was sick most of the time. I attended only on Monday in week 2 and on Thursday-Friday in week 3.

The following is what I did during those three days:

PACC: Week III

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

For this week, I started to work with program called m23. It is an alternative to the WebVirtMgr, but have much more capabilities.

Prof. Norbisrath showed us how we could connect the VMs on the server to the host (without DHCP), and assigned us to work further trying to establish connection. Alexander is going to work on connection between host with VM inside server. Meanwhile, I am trying to establish the connection between VMs themselves.

Starting internship

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Hello everyone, my name is Aset. I am an intern at NU Private Academic Cloud Computing project. I plan to work for about 5-6 hours a day.

My research topics:

Starting PACC Internship

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Hello everyone,

My name is Kamila and I am an intern of the NU Private Academic Cloud Computing project.

I plan to work for about 7-8 hours a day, partially at home.

PACC: meeting 3 notes

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Notes from PACC meeting

Date: 06.06.2013

Ilya & Damir

Programming in android studio, created application
Found resources for in class tutorials
Developing in eclipse
Read getting started Android, noticed that it is not productive

PACC: Week I & II

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Past two weeks I’ve worked on remote administration and software deployment on OS Linux computer networks.

Stages:

Exploring the way how rsync script works & finding alternatives
Finding software that meets project criteria ( CFEngine & m23)
Installation and testing CFEngine
Switching to m23
m23 VM & network configuration

PACC: Week II

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Summary:

For the past week, I was studying about the types of networks and tried to solve problem with managing VMs appeared after using SSH(Secured Shell)

Here some short notes about those types:

Developing Android applications

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Weekly review:

The first task, which I did, was choosing IDE for developing applications android. With Ilya we decided to test different IDE. I have focused on Eclipse. The reasons of choosing this IDE are:

Managing Linux Systems with m23

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Returning to the topic of maximum automatization and visualisation of remotely administrated computers running OS Linux. Up to now, we have a lot of solutions: SSH + BASH, cron, rsync and the pre-written scripts. Also for this task solutions such as Puppet, Cfengine shows very helpful. But this way of administration is difficult by some aspects and that is important non-visualizible. In this article software distribution system named “m23” (m23.sourceforge.net) will be described. This system simplifies many aspects of the administration of Linux, from deployment to daily maintenance.

'PACC: meeting 2 notes'

Tue, 28 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Notes from PACC meeting

Date: 28.05.2013

Ilya & Damir

Evaluate Android studio & Eclipse
Coordinate with each other

Goal: application with server side

Alexandr

CFEngine3, requires installation on client side
M23 only server side installation
Uses static IP for server machine. Elaborate on this.
Has GUI

TODO:
- M23 further examination & integration plan
- Write scenario about usage of the remote administration & deployment.

Temirlan
- Documentation about installing Epoptes
- Remote connection of VMs with ssh tunnel
- Textual description of GUI (like scenario)

TODO:
- Email Ulrich about GUI chapter & scenario feedback
- Amend scenario with sketches

Yerkanat
- Has looked at OpenStack cloud system

TODO (unofficial):
- Ubuntu enterprise cloud feedback

Assulan
TODO
- look into ssh tunnel and host networking in VMs

Ulrich also clarified VM networking modes.

Good overview of KVM networking modes: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM/Networking

'PACC: week 1 conclusions'

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

This past week I have started working with webvirtmgr (http://webvirtmgr.net/) that allows to create and manage VMs based on kvm using libvirt python bindings. I created a host server and several guest VMs with Linux Mint installed on them.

'PACC: Week 1'

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

At the PACC internship, at first, I started working on Italc software. I installed the program but faced some problems with authentication keys.

Then I changed the rights to the keys folder, so that a normal user (e.g. teacher) could launch Italc master’s interface.

'PACC: Week I'

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Overview:

Started research with working on iTALC installation, for monitoring lab computers. Found the alternative program called “epoptes” http://www.epoptes.org;

Here is the official installation guide http://www.epoptes.org/installation

However I have written some additional guide, which were based on the one from russian forums (Here the link http://forum.ubuntu.ru/index.php?topic=206483.0)

Starting Internship - Damir

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Despite all internships started a week ago, my internship started today. I will focus on developing Android project with server side. Also I am interested in Linux projects which will be even slightly relevant to Android.

CFEngine 3 Overview

Sun, 26 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

.. tags:CFEngine,Remote administration

Administrating network of multiple machines running the same type of tasks, sooner or later beginning to think about automatism it’s configuration and management. Programs like dssh and rsync in this case will help only partially, forcing to perform the big amount of work by hand. However, there is a tool that can automate most of the administrative functions and make a network of servers to self-adjust to the intellectual infrastructure.

Cloning or backing up a system with rsync

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

I have used rsync as the tool of my choice for a long time to often clone my system or make a backup, which I can still boot from. Feel free to use this code for your own projects. I would enjoy an attribution and a comment here or an email if you use it, but I will put this into the public domain.

PACC Project: 1st meeting (May 22)

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

**Assulan: **Worked on Virtual Web Manager (web interface), created a host-server and two virtual machines (2nd is a clone of the 1st one). Faced problems with setting up (resolved). Next step: remote connection (remotely connected virtual machines).

Temirlan Internship Introduction

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Hi,

My name is Temirlan, and I’m working as an intern in NU Private Academic Cloud Computing(PACC) project.

Number of working hours: 5-6. Time: 10:00 - 12:00 13:00 - 17:00

Internship PACC First group welcome notes

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Very exciting news. I received bridge funding for my PACC research grant, and we will now start the assoicated interships with the respective students. I already welcome Alexandr, Alxandra, Temirlan, and Assulan, who will now enrich this blog with their wisdom.

Introduction

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Hi,

My name is Alexandr, and I’m an intern at NU for Cloud Computing programm. My workhours is from 09:00 - 13:45

Topics of research:

Remote file/app pushing/Deployment

WOL

Small ssh introduction

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Some of my students, family, or friends still fear the black box with white charecters, sometimes called the shell, the command line, or the terminal. However, if you have embraced the concept and the opportunity of what you can achieve with just some simple commands typed into a box, I will give you here a small manual how to even use this power remotely. The magic command is ssh, the secure shell. Linux and MacOSX usually offer this feature by default (sometimes you have to install openssh-server), however, even windows can easily offer this using cygwin. In debian or ubuntu like system you want to issue sudo apt-get install openssh-server to install the server (to make it possible to display the command line from a different computer). A client on MacOSX and Linux systems you just type ssh into a command line, fo rwindows you either want cygwin or putty.

Starting the Internship

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Today is the starting day of the internship of Cloud Computing project. I will be working for about 6 hours per day for 6-8 weeks.

I am going to start with working on iTALC.

VM management tools

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Projects that might be of interest for PACC:

https://www.webvirtmgr.net/ - WebVirtMgr is a libvirt-based Web interface for managing virtual machines. It allows you to create and configure new domains, and adjust a domain’s resource allocation. A VNC viewer over a SSH tunnel presents a full graphical console to the guest domain. KVM is currently the only hypervisor supported. It uses Django/Python as web framework, and Python libvirt (http://libvirt.org/python.html) as a tool to manage VMs.

Welcome from Assulan

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Hi,

My name is Assulan and I am a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Computer Science in Nazarbayev University. I will be involved in PACC project.

Research group digest

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Cloud Computing Contracts

The new delivery model for information processing, Cloud Computing is offering an attractive value proposition: Dynamic (on-demand) provisioning of IT resources Low cost because of the use of economy of scale and multi-tenancy sharing of resources Shorter time to market in deploying resources Different cost structure; the shift from CAPEX to OPEX But although this […]

Research group digest

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Disable all swapping on Ubuntu Linux

That’s how it goes for Ubuntu:

Disable current swapping strategy ( swappiness it’s called)

echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

Disable swapping all together

swapoff -a

Research group digest

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0200

My Search Logger is OUT!

Hi all!

I am happy to announce that my proxy-based search task logging software is now (finally) available to DOWNLOAD! There are a number of new features and improved existing ones. In order to get an idea of what to expect, I will share a few snapshots. Happy searching!

Research group digest

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 +0200

5 Ways Your Users Can Benefit from Cloud Anti-Spam

While many email admins prefer to keep their messaging hygiene in their own datacenters, others who are looking to save money and reduce the amount of hardware in their datacenters should consider cloud anti-spam solutions. There are some great features in cloud anti-spam that can help admins and their systems, and, let’s not forget, our […]

Research group digest

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Rolling your own watchdog for Qemu

Sometimes there may arise a need to make your own watchdog for your virtual machine. The process itself is really a simple one, I will base this example on Intel’s 6300esb watchdog.

Research group digest

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

How to do a search report? The Search Logger 2.0 usability study

Summary

The background

The aim of the Search Task Repository project is to let the users/Internet searchers publish their annotated search logs and make these logs searchable. In order to log ones search activity and behaviour, we have developed a special tool called The Search Logger 2.0. Here “2.0” means that a conceptually similar but technically very different logger existed before I started with this project and was developed by Hannu Kikkas. The current version is platform-independent and uses a proxy to modify every web page served so that it could be logged by our dedicated HTTP server. The Search Task Repository is currently in development and will be one of the main topics of my Master thesis.

Research group digest

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Two new search tasks

Hello all,

I have two new exploratory search tasks with complete search logger data to report.

The first one is seasonal: finding 5 clever Christmas present ideas for under 10 euros per item. Target is unfixed but you can assume it is a lady.

t-mobile US in Linux with wvdial and HUAWEI USB Modem

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Just got my day-pass option with t-mobile under Linux and my HUAWEI USB-Stick HDSPA-Modem (lists as Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E220 HSDPA Modem / E230/E270 HSDPA/HSUPA Modem in lsusb) running. Now I pay $2 per day, if I need Internet on that day (only 2G speed - I measured, I got something around 9-16Kbytes per second - enough to even use Skype). For $3 a day you get even 200MB on 4G speed. Nice is that the connection is apart from the speed not capped. Pretty good prepaid optionin the US. I got a second SIM-card for this purpose (didn’t want to lose my gold status on my “normal” prepaid card).

Broken mime types or program associations in XFCE4.8

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Just recently I had lots of weird things happening on my desktop. The Places-addon of Xfce4 was for example opening always my mp3-player qmmp, when I clicked on a folder. Interesting default?! Also when opening pdf and epub-files always calibre was the default.

Research group digest

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Search Logger 2.0 DEMO video

Here you will find a video of somewhat superior quality. Enjoy!

Aspects of the software covered in this video:

filling in pre- and post-forms by the user
automatic logging of the user search behaviour
different log formats
searching itself using Google

Aspects NOT covered in the screencast:

Research group digest

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Green cloud computing, which way to go?

What is the right cloud architecture to create a green and sustainable cloud? Should we consolidate to huge mega data centers or is there another way to go? The analogy Currently data centers are constructed on the intersection of the electrical energy infrastructure and the network (data) infrastructure. Considering the current electrical energy infrastructure, for […]

Research group digest

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

How are cloud computing companies going to effect the online storage service industry?

Recently Eric Greenwood from OnlineStorage.org asked, me “..Do you have any opinions on how cloud computing companies are going to effect the online storage service industry? A view from an economic mind like yours would be very interesting!” Aren´t online storage service providers themselves also cloud computing companies? I am a heavy (not yet paying) user of […]

Research group digest

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Initial screencast of the interface

Hi!

I carried out another search task and recorded a screencast presenting the whole process.

Task:

Compile a list of the five best universities (worldwide) to achieve a master’s in machine engineering (or closely related field) under the condition that you have 1500 EUR per month available to cover all involved costs.

Sound in Linux (and pulseaudio) – finally works with rt-kernel?

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Just wanted to share an interesting observation. I had quite some trouble with some programs in Linux playing sound (most programs like vnc working nicely), mainly with kvm but also musescore - it was allways stuttering. For fun I just installed the 3.0.0-2-rt-amd64 kernel and hey, the stuttering is gone!

Howto install non-debian python packages in debian

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

I have messed up my python system under debian quite often. Today I had to install rpyc for a project – no luck, no debian package.

So, How can I install non-existent python packages in debian in a clean way?

Research group digest

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

User testing + bugfixes + further development

Hi!

These are the main keywords for the coming weeks: I am trying to put myself into the end user’s perspective by testing the logging capabilities of the existing search task logger system. Each week I come up with a new expoloratory search task, carry out the testing and report crashes, bugs, new development ideas, etc. What is more, I try and fix more urgent bugs as well. This part (but mainly inventing new exploratory search tasks and generating usage data) serves as the DS Seminar work for this semester. In parallel, I am also trying to pursue new ideas regarding the Search Task Repository and make them a reality.

Distorted sound and beeps in Flashplayer under 64-bit Linux

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Some Videos, I was watching in flashplayer under Linux behaved a little weird and had distorted sound with some beeping. Basically the sound was understandable but heavily distorted. An Internet search revealed that it has todo with some obsoleted use of memcpy in flashplayer.

Jitsi - finally a cross platform Skype alternative

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Due to Skype’s ever lasting bad Linux support and various crashes, I started to look for an alternative. I do give Skype credit, they try to take a lot of effort from the user to get things running. I toyed a bit around with jingle from jabber, but with not much success, neither Pidgin nor Empathy get the communication over Jingle right. However, I was pretty often (sadly not always - but I have to admit there were some pretty tough firewalls, I tried it with) successful with Jitsi. Yes, I should have tried this earlier as I was google-mentor for sip-communicator, Jitsi’s predecessor, several times. Ok, Jitsi, I am back as one of your loyal supporters.

Research group digest

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Is Amazon the cheapest cloud computing provider?

When people think of cloud computing, they almost automatically think of Amazon EC2. Amazon has become the cloud computing company and is commonly perceived as the cheapest, if not the only, IaaS provider. But is this really so? Let’s play Myth Busters as on the Discovery Channel. Cloud Computing Myth Busters! We will compare all […]

Research group digest

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Amazon and Microsoft in Dublin down, resiliency of cloud computing

A lightning strike in Dublin, Ireland, has caused downtime for many sites using Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform, as well as users of Microsoft’s BPOS. Amazon said that lightning struck a transformer near its data center, causing an explosion and fire that knocked out utility service and left it unable to start its generators, resulting […]

Research group digest

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0200

update delays

Arrived to Sweden couple of days ago, intend to stay here until January to study in KTH. During the following next week I will be busy involved in the introductory activities and also lack decent internet connection, so no update will follow. I apologize for inconvenience.

Research group digest

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Comparing prices of cloud computing providers

When considering ROI maximization of cloud computing solutions it is crucial to minimize costs of cloud hosting, especially that differences can be very big. Anyone who has tried to compare prices of IaaS providers knows that it is a very tedious task if done manually, since there are different pricing models used, there are subscription […]

LEGO Antikythera -- Another step to LEGO World Domination

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Not much recently on my Blog - yep I know, it’s summer!

Here just discovered for you some ultimate toy built in LEGO. Now it would be great, if you could buy this prepackaged in a box.

Research group digest

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0200

On delivering reliable services using spot instances

In the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market, spot instances refer to virtual servers that are rented via an auction. Spot instances allow IaaS providers to sell spare capacity while enabling IaaS users to acquire virtual servers at a lower price than the regular market price (also called “on demand” price). Users bid for spot instances at […]

book writing -- 201 pages -- reason to celebrate

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Yep, it’s done, we made the 200! We were busy writing and drawing a lot. Now we made it already pretty far. This is a a reason to celebrate a bit with a glass of Viru Valge. Terviseks!

book writing - story driven modeling - 167 pages

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Back to seclusion and book writing mode – that’s why you don’t see me online these days. We are performing well, have hit 167 pages yesterday. The content production becomes harder, but we are still confident to get something ready this time, which we can present to a potential publisher.

Research group digest

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

The Economics of Cloud Computing Examined

The cloud computing economic model is expected to bring significant rewards – apparently. Those rewards may be possible but the quality of analysis to demonstrate that the cloud paradigm will yield an ever-growing margin is far from assured. The assumptions underlying the economics of the cloud are tenuous and therefore the promotions and promises should […]

Research group digest

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Cloud economics penalizes large workloads

Cloud computing is heavily promoted as the low-cost alternative to in-house data centers. Yet this is not true for any context and any application. A recent paper with the title “To Move or Not to Move: The Economics of Cloud Computing” by Byung Chul Tak, Bhuvan Urgaonkar, and Anand Sivasubramainam states that especially applications with […]

Solved digikam crashing

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

My digikam program stopped working on my Debian desktop and finally I found out why. I always got the following error message:

QSqlDatabasePrivate removeDatabase connection ConnectionTest is still in use all queries will cease to work

Trip to Biometry to Lucerne, Pictures uploaded

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

I had a great trip to visit Biometry in Lucerne as the winner of the Mobile Monday Biometry competitions. Apart from very good business talks, we had also some great social time;

Research group digest

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Python library for calculating cloud costs

Within SITIO project we developed several tools for calculating and predicting costs of running IT systems on various clouds. Recently we open-sourced one of such tools – python library ‘cloud-calculator’. Source is here: https://github.com/HEP-KBFI/ccc. Using easy_tools it can be installed as easy as “easy_install cloud-calculator”. In this blob post we show sample usage of this […]

Research group digest

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Python library for calculating cloud costs.

Within SITIO project we developed several tools for calculating and predicting costs of running IT systems on various clouds. Recently we open-sourced one of such tools – python library ‘cloud-calculator’. Source is here: https://github.com/HEP-KBFI/ccc . Using easy_tools it can be installed as easy as “easy_install cloud-calculator”. In this blob post we show sample usage of […]

Research group digest

Mon, 30 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Low-level awesomeness!

Get the high performance computation as close to the metal as possible: http://www.returninfinity.com/

Research group digest

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Cloud Computing; Freedom of Choice?

Shortening time to market, increasing transaction volumes, 24 x 7 business, all at lesser costs puts a burden on the information processing of organizations. How should one adapting to the increasing complexity and changes of the organization and its environment? The new delivery model for information processing, Cloud Computing, with an on-demand provisioning of computational […]

Research group digest

Thu, 26 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Distributed Systems Seminar Presentation

Today’s presentation slides and a demo of mesh topology setup.

Troubles, troubles again

In the beginning of May it was decided that it’s time to move our machines from VirtualBox to the cloud. We even had a program developed for that case. But… it turned out to be too complicated. Despite installing all the required packages, and even installing them in the right places, the program still refuses to run. Google doesn’t say much as well. So moving to the clouds will be postponed a little bit.

Research group digest

Tue, 17 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Using libguestfs to migrate images to cloud

In a previous post, I described some difficulties regarding manipulating VM images. Problems included mounting filesystems supported by the VM but not the host, and file permissions for those systems that were supported. One suggestion was to mount the image in another VM that would allow for complete control. Lucky for us, it turns out […]

Research group digest

Tue, 10 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Reserved or On-Demand Instances? A Revenue Maximization Model for Cloud Providers

Cloud providers who operate large and medium-scale data centers and offer their services on a pay-per-usage basis face a challenging problem of running data centers in an energy- efficient manner while ensuring that customers’ expectations in terms of availability are met. Cloud providers benefit from significant economies of scale, since they operate large infrastructures shared […]

Research group digest

Sat, 07 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Kernel 32 vs 64 discovery

We were recently given a VirtualBox image configured to run the HPCC benchmark suite. The code to determine the OS architecture is pretty naive, and we paid for it. The code simply checked for the presence of the substring ‘amd64′ in the kernel name. The image didn’t have it, so it was migrated to EC2 […]

Research group digest

Fri, 06 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

F2F meets Qemu

This post is about setting up VDE network between qemu machines through a F2F job. Tools I used are dpipe, vde_switch, vde_plug, nc, everything wrapped into python code that is in turn called from F2F job.

Research group digest

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service down the fourth day

I am a happy and loyal user of Dropbox.com. Well, I was at least. When hovering over the Dropbox icon, I only see “Dropbox 0.7.110 Connecting…..” lately. Weird, I thought. Well, no problem, fire up Firefox and check out Dropbox’s web page to see what is going on. Good try, but also a complete waste […]

Research group digest

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Same test, new hardware

Finally I got myself a new laptop that is the fastest thing I’ve ever used; this significant change in the hardware forced me to run the same test one more time, in case of results being importantly different. So, here are the graphs for the same two things (WIPS and TT.H). The parameters are the same as in the last post, though there is a slight difference: number of emulated browsers is 20 (red) and 40 (green).

Research group digest

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Cloud computing – a disruptive new business model

As organizations increase their offerings of digital services, the demand for computing and storage capability increases. Also the need for faster, more complex data processing is becoming widespread. Additional demand for computing capability can only be met by increasing the processing capacity of servers within data centers. Along with greater computing capability, businesses have increased […]

Research group digest

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Microsoft White Paper – Economic Benefits of Cloud Computing

Microsoft has recently, in November 2010, published a white paper with the title “The Economics of the Cloud”. In this white paper the authors mention the following potential cost savings for organisations: Cloud also allows core IT infrastructure to be brought into large data centers that take advantage of significant economies of scale in three […]

A geek-child's dream -- a LEGO sorter

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Another amazing outcome of human creativity – how would I have loved this a child – of course, it would have had to be even bigger with plenty more buckets.

TurtleBot - Gadgets the next level?

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

After having totally networked my home (and after being totally fluent in Android programming), I think this hobby robot platform (TurtleBot) might be just the right thing. They call it “apps on wheels” – sounds like good fun! Have a look yourself:

Reviving Thinkpad X24 with Xubuntu and GLX-Dock

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

On my experiment turning an old Thinkpad X24 notebook in a nice internet tablet, I have tried out several things. I have still in mind running in the end Android on this device, but I need more time to understand how the Android X86 system works. At the moment it runs in Vesa mode, but this is too sluggish for real use. There seem to be some issues with the radeon module. As an intermediate solution, I decided to use Xubuntu which installed nicely without hassle. I have new fancy very small wlan usb stick (rtl8192cu). This made a little trouble until I tired to compile the drivers available on the cd shipping with it, which worked perfectly with the standard Ubuntu kernel. I had more trouble with suspending the machine. Also here, the radeon module seems to make trouble. After a long search, I found the very simple solution: add radeon.modeset=0 to the kernel command line in grub (edit /etc/default/grub, run update-grub) and install uswsusp. This disbaled the mode switching in the radeon module and now I can suspend – cool! USWSuspend worked a bit better with my wifi and bluetooth driver. I also added the bluetooth-quirk to as extra parameter /etc/pm/config.d/99myown. The file contains now the following: # my own configs for this here [ulno] SLEEP_MODULE=uswsusp ADD_PARAMETERS="--quirk-bluetooth-service-off"

Mixer control with multimedia keys und multiple soundcards in XFCE4 on debian

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

.. or ubuntu .. tags: techblog

Just struggled over a pretty weird phenomenon. Nowadays multimedia-keys in current Linux distributions usually work flawlessly. When you type the “Louder”-key you usually see a little on-screen display that shows you that you increased your volume. However, when having multiple soundcards and running the XFCE4 desktop it always uses the first mixer-element of the first soundcard available. After searching around a bit, I often read the solution to use System-Preferences-Sound (which is basically the sound setting in gnome-control-panel) to select a default soundcard - it would be automatically used from the multimedia keys – wrong. Does not work in XFCE4. After some more frustrating search (probably should use this one for our search experiment with search-logger), I discovered that xfce4-soundd is responsible for these actions. This one uses settings from xfce4-mixer. However, selecting a soundcard in xfce4-mixer still doesn’t do the job.

Research group digest

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

EC2 Deployment and Lifecycle API

I’ve just finished my first working draft of a python API to describe and execute an EC2 deployment with a controlled lifecycle. This is part of the larger Desktop-to-Cloud (D2C) project, aimed at assisting researchers with deploying scientific, job-based applications to the cloud. An Example deployment = Deployment( name=“testDeployment”, ec2ConnFactory=ec2ConnFactory, roles=[ Role( name=“testRole”, ami=AMI(amiId=“ami-47cefa33”), count=1, […]

Story Driven Modeling -- 101 pages!

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

We made good progress and had lots of intellectually very challenging discussion - thanks Albert. I think it was a very successful event. We will fix up some more little things and head home tomorrow. It worked out great. Take a look at some more impressions (this time all pictures straight).

Story Driven Modeling -- 65 pages!

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

We are staying at a beautiful and quiet place and are very productive. We are already up to 65 pages (we started with 27). Here are some impressions of our work climate:

Research group digest

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Finally - running the tests

The main idea of using TPC-W benchmark was to have a tool that would measure different stats like execution time and throughput. Output file is in Matlab format, which makes it a bit complicated for understanding, so I have almost no idea what all obtained numbers mean :)

A week seclusion to make progress in Story Driven Modeling book

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

I am just heading to Kassel, Germany to meet Albert and Ruben to continue to a secluded place in Northern Germany to continue writing on our text book on Story Driven Modeling and the Objects first method. I will be not much online (maybe in the evening) and if you need to reach me, you can (in an emergency) call my German cell phone number (available on the contact page). We will work with a tremendous amount of energy and determination for the following week. Stay tuned, I will try to report progress here.

MoMo St. Petersburg -- recap

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

I am home again and am heading soon to Germany. MoMo-Estonia already released their summary of the event at http://www.momoestonia.com/2011/03/summary-estonian-entrepreneurs-in-st.html and therefore beat me to mine. However, I will still share here my own personal view of the event with you. Just for a short summary, it was a great event with plenty of networking and interesting presentations. I would have wished having more student and academic contacts, but probably I should have done more local advertising in advance. However, I got valuable contacts and look forward to following up with them.

F2F Development Page

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Updated F2F Development page, added module descriptions, the list of development requirements, also provided short repository description including current tags and branches.

F2F LLVM Computing Engine

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

LLVM Computing Engine has been recently updated to support LLVM versions 2.7 and 2.8. The Low Level Virtual Machine compiler infrastructure is used to run the High Performance Computing C/C++ code remotely and platform-independent.

'MoMo: Slides uploaded'

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Just uploaded my slides for the talk today to http://momo.ulno.net (under resources) or download them directly from http://ulno.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/momo-st-petersburg.pdf.

Twitter Tools test

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Now I have activated Twitter Tools. Now I should get my posts on Facebook and twitter. testing

Wordbooker

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0200

I am trying out a possibility to automatically post my blog posts to Facebook. Let’s see if Wordbooker does a good job.

The first time I tried it, I got two entries on my Wall, let’s hope that now there is only one. Sorry for spamming!

MoMo St. Petersburg -- Arrived

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

We arrived in St. Pete. We had no trouble at the border and so we had some time to do some sightseeing. Unfortunately, the weather was a little cold and the sky a little gray - however, the buildings were still very impressive. See yourself:

MoMo St. Petersburg -- Tallinn - St. Petersburg

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Next leg of the trip:

We are traveling in a very luxurious Hansabus, each of us is working on their notebooks or phones, drinking tea and coffee and enjoying the trip.

MoMo St. Petersburg -- I am coming!

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

I am just sitting in the bus to Tallinn to head out to MoMo St. Petersburg tomorrow. I am excited to be invited to give a talk on our research at the Institute of Computer Science in Tartu on this event. I will use these posts to give some further information relating to my talk on Monday evening.

Research group digest

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Risks and rewards of moving applications to the cloud – a white paper

We have recently come across an interesting discussion group called “Cloudusecases.org”. It has published two white papers titled “Cloud Computing Use Cases White Paper” and “Moving to the Cloud – Risks and rewards of moving applications to the cloud“. Both papers are very interesting and informative. Especially the second one suggests the following very straight […]

Eclipse to ADT on 64bit

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Just something, I would like to write down her, because it cost me a lot of time to figure out. I couldn’t talk to the Android simulator in eclipse after upgrading my system. I had to change in /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf the variable net.ipv6.bindv6only from 1 to 0. This seems also to concern other networking problems in Java - not so sure if it is at all 64 bit related, but it happened with this update.

F2F IPv6 Proxy

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

The IPv4 is officially exhausted, and there are number of services in the Web already which are IPv6 only (exmple: ipv6.google.com). However the major ISP are still using IPv4 preventing direct routing to IPv6 sites. Currently the issue is solved by tunneling the IPv6 routes through IPv4 networks. However the setup is not intuitive enough to the mainstream users. Because of this fact we propose F2F based private IPv6 Proxy solution. It allows to expose the IPv6 routing gateways in private F2F Group. In other words if one of the friends occurs to have pure IPv6 he can a be a IPv6 proxy for his friends (who have IPv4 only) within the private F2F group. All the IPv6 requests within the private group will be served by Proxy-Friend. Currently we are looking for the lightweight opensource proxy utility to embed into F2F distributed application.

F2F Java Console Front-End

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Java is a popular mainstream language its support is essential to increase the F2F Developers Community. In the beginning of this year we implemented JNI support in F2F Core, now the pure Java development (without even thinking of F2F C-nature) is possible. Currently we are working on stabilizing the first Java based F2F console Front-End (called Headless-Java by analogy to Headless-Python). If the mentioned console application will be approved successful, the next will be to port F2F Core (with JNI support) to the Sip Communicator messenger.

F2F Security

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Security is the most vulnerable part of any P2P system. In F2F we are bootstrapping P2P TCP communication using existing IM protocols (which are secure and authenticated by default). However the flexible communication layer of the F2F Computing allows to operate in TCP only (after successful bootstrap routine). In other words once the peer joined the private F2F group using his IM account, he is automatically connected to all the participants through TCP as well. Now if this new peer goes offline/online the P2P communication should be restored quickly without IM usage. Thanks to help of the Security Group of CS department we designed one possible solution and currently start implementing it.

Hardware virtualization on Sony Vaio P

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

On my way to getting Android running on the Sony Vaio P, I thought I would first try to get Android running in a virtual machine. I was going to try kvm and virtualbox. To make sure to run with maximum speed, I wanted to switch on hardware virtualization as I found out that the built in Atom processor should actually be capable of it. Sadly I found out that Sony disabled this feature in the Bios and didn’t expose any setting in the Bios to switch it on - what an odd choice (reminds me that I should write a huge rant about Sony concerning taking away the linux support for my Playsations, I am running here for interested students in the office).

Research group digest

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

To cloud or not to cloud – that’s the question

Amid the hype around cloud computing and the millions of dollars pumped into marketing those utility computing services, not every business operation will benefit by moving to the cloud. In fact it is quite simple economic considerations, that allow to make a better decision on whether to move a certain application to the cloud – […]

First success compiling android x86

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

I have a small Sony Vaio P, which is very pretty but seeks for new tasks in my humble home. So in terms of diving deeper into Android, I started taking a closer look at the Android X86 project. I tried to run the image in virtualbox and qemu/kvm.

Research group digest

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

First Desktop-to-Cloud Job Execution

Minor success! This past week we ran our first real-world experiment on EC2 using the under-development D2C tool. The desktop tool transformed VirtualBox 64bit Ubuntu images to AMIs and launched 4 EC2 instances. Manual intervention was required to start the actual program conducting the experiment, as “auto launch” is not yet an implemented feature of […]

Research group digest

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

I’m making some progress! [configuration-wise]

My main efforts have gone to getting the SearchLogger server side working. It never worked on Windows but now it works perfectly on Linux. I also reverted from XAMPP back to traditional PHP 5 + Apache 2 + MySQL 5. The setup script worked just fine and no problems persists on the server side.

Coffee gadget

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

.. tags:coffee,physics

After some lengthy discussion about coffee machines (great as a non coffee drinker), Chris Willmore pointed me at another wonder of physics. Who wants one of these fancy coffee machines anyway - If you really want to show off, this might be the right thing for you:

Load-Balancers

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

I was today taking a look into several load-balancers for a project of a colleague. I was especially interested in simple http load-balancers which would be easy to hack or easily remotely controllable. After searching freshmeat and for simple load-balancers in java and python in google. I turned up the following:

Simple Python Webserver

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

While toying around with load-balancers I also re-discovered at the same time how easy it is to serve a directory in a local webserver on a specific port in python. Just change to the directory and type:

wolframalpha

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

I just figured out wolframalpha which is a very nice search site for technical stuff. http://www.wolframalpha.com/ Uli helped me in rediscovering it again.

Welcome to my blog!

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Ok, most stuff is converted from moinmoin to wordpress now! Let’s explore more. Soon the blogging can start.